Blog

If you’ve discovered you have German ancestors who lived in Lithuania, you may be overwhelmed trying to understand who they were and what they were doing in Lithuania. This post tries to provide a basic overview of the Deutsche aus Litauen and what you need to know before you start your research.

The tiny village of Luki (Lithuania Liukių) lies just north of Wischtiten (Lithuanian Vistytis) and due to its size, its history is foggy. Lithuanian writer Ugnė Ražinskaitė has written a short history of this village and it’s presented here in an English translation.

Arthur Hermann’s “Litauendeutsche Während des Zweiten Weltkriegs” provides a useful overview of the experience and attitude of German Lithuanians (Prussian-Lithuanians) during WWII. Here I bullet-point my own takeaways and notes from his paper published in the Annaberger Annalen